Why Selective Popularizations of Gender Science Matter. A Repost.

Linked to the previous post and the earlier summer reruns of my gender science series, this post is well worth reading and thinking about. 

The Gender Studies Which Don't Get Popularized. A Repost.

This is a fun example of the kind of study we won't find screaming at us from every single channel when we wake up.

How To Judge Social Science Research

This post is still pretty much how I think of the salient points.  I should note that the promotion of papers before they are at all available is still ongoing, and that in at least one case  it has resulted in a widespread popularization of a working paper which seems not to have been published anywhere at all!   The most common reason for such non-publication is that the paper failed to pass peer-review.  Yet the popularizations are still available on the Internet!

Feel free to add any points I missed in my list.

On The Quest For Unattainable Perfection. A Repost.

 This rant is adapted from here.


The topic of this post is the view of eating and exercise as a moral or religious enterprise or a competition as to who can get closest to an almost nonexistent thinness without dying, without dying EVER!

These are two very different ideas and putting them together looks like an oxymoron. But it is not, or if it is, then life is full of oxymorons (oxymora?).

The first idea is the Puritanical one, still quite common in this country, the idea of life as a moral struggle against temptations, a religious walk through nonreligious sins. Everything, I have noticed, can be twisted into a moral failure by some people, often by experts. Who was it who said that only in the United States it is the fault of the elderly that they die? Because clearly, if you try hard enough, if you are earnest enough, pure enough, you will live forever. And your body will look like that of a twenty-year old, forever, too. If it does not you have sinned, and perhaps the health insurance shouldn't cover your sinning.

Why does this anger me so? Partly because I'm using my red-hot anger as a source of energy, but mostly because such sermons make life really horrible for those most vulnerable to its seductions. For note that the people who read articles on good eating and good exercise and how to take care of your health are not those sedentary and overweight Americans who might benefit from the advice the most. They are also, and perhaps most likely, those Americans who are already too thin and who already overexercise.

I've thought similar thoughts on the many articles on "good mothering" and the awful consequences of neglectful mothering. I'm willing to bet quite a lot that the wrong people are affected by these articles, people who already try too hard and feel too much guilt, and that the people who actually might learn something useful from them (and this does not only mean mothers) will not read the articles or if they do are not affected by them.

What is it about pleasure and enjoyment of life that is so very bad? Think about it. If your daily meals can't give you enough pleasure, because they have become part of the Puritan "religion" of striving, where are you going to get your good feelings from? And if all you see when you look at your children are the many ways you might fail in bringing them up correctly (did you play enough Beethoven? did you eat a pickle while pregnant?), how are you going to enjoy them and the time you spend with them?

And if moving and exercising and dancing are not making you feel a little like one of God's little acrobats, because you are busy writing down your pulse rate and your calorie consumption, when are you ever going to feel that divine breath on your nostrils? Or take sex. If sex is all about counting weekly frequencies and how good your orgasms are, when are you going to have fun?

All this confuses the trip with its destination, and as none of us knows the destination, why not enjoy the trip?

My plea is for moderation, of course, not for becoming a morbidly ill couch potato. But I don't really see the urgings of the fitness and health industries as pleas for moderation, most of the time. There is a slippage towards one extreme or another, all the time. And come to think about it, "moderation" isn't the right word, either, because it conveys the idea of temptations successfully avoided. We need a better word for what I think of as living life as a human being, eating wonderful and healthy (and sometimes not-so healthy) food, moving enough for your body to stay limber, enjoying the gifts this can give you in pure enjoyment of life. We need a word that makes it quite clear being alive is not just a time given to you so that you can leave the stringiest body possible when you die. And die you will.

So much for the first paradoxical idea. The second one has to do with the role of all this in the lives of women, in particular, rather than in the lives of people, in general. There is a whole sub-genre of writings and programs aimed at making women feel in the need of improvement. This sub-genre serves firms very well, as a worried woman is more likely to buy that expensive face-cream or that educational toy for her child or that Victoria's Secret bra for her husband's ogling enjoyment. The guilt industry, I sometimes think it should be called.

The guilt industry works especially well in affecting women, because the sub-genre is not that novel. You read the Bible and find Eve at fault. You watch movies such as "Educating Rita" and you find women in need of improvement. You read fashion magazines and find your body needs fixing. You read articles on child psychology and find that you are walking across a mine-field where every wrong step will cause your child to become a drug abuser who will hate you, the mother in later life. You read anti-feminist writings and find that some argue that women shouldn't have been given the vote. You read other anti-feminist articles and find that women are already ruling the whole world and that this is destroying EVERYTHING. You read articles about women in Afghanistan getting killed by their families for the crime of having been raped by some strangers first. You read articles about how the selfish and uppity women in Europe refuse to have enough children to perpetuate the White Ueberrace (and you wonder how much damage they would have done to those nonexistent children by forgetting to play Beethoven while pregnant). And so on.

It's one way of making a person into a pretzel. (And don't come in here giving me counterexamples or scolding me for my intemperance. I'm on a roll.) Even a woman can become a pretzel, and that is a painful process. So what's a girl to do? It's not that hard to see that on some subconscious level many women think that they can somehow prove that they are not so bad, that at least they, if not other women, can be good and upright and ordinary citizens. Maybe working on the body will help. Or committing to Motherhood. Or saying that YOU agree about how terrible other women are, but that YOU are one of the women with a mental penis. YOU are ok. You are not Britney Spears  or Hillary Clinton or Condie Rice or any of those other nasty uppity women who for some reason are seen as a stand-in for all women.

Added in 2012:  This comes across as a bit extreme, right now.  But getting immunized against the guilt industry is a very good idea for all of us.

A Repost: Why Would Wal-Mart Hire Any Men?

This is actually a pretty important post because a commonly heard argument from some people is that women can't be discriminated against!  Because if they were, the god of free markets would sweep in and turn all bigoted firms into bankruptcies.

The thinking goes like this:  If a man and a woman are equally good workers but the market pays the woman less than the man, just because of gender, what profit-making firm in its right mind would ever hire any men?

The simple answer is that things are much more complicated than that.  The proper answer can be found here.

A Repost: Your Inner Glass Ceiling

This post also addresses the possible reasons for the gender gap in wages.  Like it's your own fault and so on.

There Is No Gender Gap in Wages, Silly Women. Part 2.

The second post in this series can be found here.

There Is No Gender Gap in Wages, Silly Women! Part 1

This is the first of two posts which add to the arguments in the gender gap series.  It's based on more recent political debates than the series itself and also addresses some poorly made studies.

The Gender Gap Series: Addressing the Wingnuts and the MRAs

The third and last post in this series discusses the politicization of the gender gap concept and why almost all the treatments of it are tainted in political debate.  If you have waded through the two previous posts you will understand this much better.

In hindsight, had I known about the MRA arguments in 2006 I would have addressed some I don't in this post.  But despair not,  the next series will get into some of that!

The Gender Gap Series: Empirical Evidence

In this one I look in great detail at one study.  It's somewhat outdated by now but the point of the post is to explain how these kinds of studies are done and interpreted, and the study I picked is a fairly proficient one.  That it also tried to find no discrimination and failed in that is noteworthy.

The Gender Gap Series: Theories

This is a summer rerun.  The series consists of three posts, the first having to do with the theories about why women earn less than men, in general.  The second post will look at one empirical study in detail and discuss empirical evidence in general.

I strongly recommend this series  to all of those who have been taken in by facile arguments from one side or the other.

Statistics Series: Wrapping Up

This is the last post in the series.  As I mentioned in the context of the first post, this is not an actual course in statistics but a mere appetizer.  I hope it helped you understand some of the arguments about polling, for instance.

Statistics series. Constructing a confidence interval. Part 5

Getting into scrunchy stuff here.

Statistics Series. Sampling Distributions. Part 4.

The post is here.

Statistics Series: Sample Statistics. Part 3.

The post can be found here.

Statistics Series: Probability. Part 2

The post can be found here.

Statistics Series: Samples. Part 1

The first post can be found here.

This series is a summer rerun.  I recommend it if you have never taken statistics.  Note that it is NOT a substitute for an actual statistics course.  It dips into the material a bit and it tries to do it in a way which does not provoke math phobias.  At some points I skate on fairly thin ice because of my desire to keep things as simple as possible but I hope I didn't fall through.

On The Feminism Series, in Hindsight (2012)

The series is not complete and some of those posts do need editing and rewriting.  But I still agree with them.  I'd add something about the much intensified misogyny*, especially via the Internet.  That is a real problem.

If you doubt that, check out the Manboobs blog in the list on the right.  Then randomly look at a few YouTube comments which are linked to female athletes, say.

The misogyny is almost impossible to avoid.  This does not mean that most men or women are misogynists.  It's likely just a small percentage.  But they sure are loud.  Sadly, they are often pretty stupid.  For instance, I just (June 29th)  got back from reading an opinion piece which argued that women only write about trivial shit and that politics and economics are not fields that would interest those hen-brained chicks.

Very funny, given that I write on economics and politics.  But what's even funnier is that this man quite seriously gave as evidence for his arguments that some study found that girls between the ages of fifteen and seventeen mostly write blogs about clothes.

Why would the louder misogyny make feminism more important?  After all, the misogynists often argue that they are fighting feminism, not women, though they then lapse into bashing even very docile women who do all they are told.

Heh.  The reason is right there.  No misogynist will ever be satisfied that the level of oppression is adequate.  And the only way to fight misogyny is for right-thinking people to point it out and ridicule it whenever they come across it.

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*Misogyny itself may not be more intense.  But the chances of  meeting it in one's daily life are much higher now that we are all on the net.  This holds even if that "one" religiously tries to avoid getting sprayed by it.   Like poison ivy or someone pissing on your shoes.

A Repost: The Longest Revolution

The last post in the feminism series.  At least so far.

Greetings from Europe

And my deepest apologies for all readers in other countries save the US.  The blog looks like real crap when read from here.  Things will change when I get back from frolicking in the sun rain.